(eng) Nick Webb by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 50

Near Penumbra System

Science Laboratory, ISS Warrior

“Tim, what if it really is just a dream?”

“It’s not just a dream, Shelby.”

The captains had returned to their ships with Granger having argued them to an impasse. It wasn’t rational, he knew—there was no reason he could give to convince them that the planet was, truly, the Swarm homeworld.

But he remembered how he felt in that dream—dammit, it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. A memory that was somehow made more intense by the touch of the Dolmasi. And in that memory—yearning. Excitement. He remembered feeling those things. Getting up from that examination table and looking down on that planet from that window and knowing, just knowing, that he was looking at the homeworld. The point of origin of the Swarm. The source of all their problems.

“Ok. What if it’s something the Swarm wants you to think?”

He cocked his head at her. They were in a lab she’d appropriated from the ship’s science team, she peering down through some type of imaging device at a sample. Some Swarm matter they’d stored in secure, triply-walled and sealed sample vials.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, just suppose for a moment that when you were gone to … wherever you went, that you were put under the influence of the Swarm, or otherwise had something planted in you. A memory. Something to tell you to come to this planet. Something to lure you here with a large portion of the IDF fleet. Then, they’re waiting for you, and they destroy you, leaving the path clear to take Earth and the rest of humanity.”

Granger snorted. “Why go to all the trouble? Seems a convoluted way to get us all in one place. Why not just amass a thousand Swarm ships, let us see them, and then move very slowly towards Earth. That would get our attention. We’d be forced to defend with everything we had, again. And when we did, they send in their reserve force, and pow.” He thumped the table.

She looked up and glared at his fist. “Careful. Science in progress.”

“Sorry,” he said, withdrawing his hand from the table.

She shrugged. “I know, it’s a stretch, but so is everything else, Tim. So is thinking that this is the actual, honest-to-god Swarm homeworld that we just happen to stumble into and it just happens to match the world from your dreams—”

“Memories,” he interrupted. “Let’s call them what they are.”

She looked up at him again with a scowl. “We don’t know that, Tim. They could be anything. We have no idea where you—”

“I know. Dammit, I know, I know—”

“—went that day or who you talked to or what they did to you—”

“—dammit, I know! I know—”

“—or what, pardon me for bringing it up, they injected you with that got rid of that cancer! Plus the pesky detail that you were gone not for twenty seconds, but for three goddamned days, Tim!”

“I know! Dammit,” he said, trailing off, shaking his head. “You have no idea what this is like for me.

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